June 03, 2008

Australian blogger David Schütz, a sometime Lutheran pastor and now Roman Catholic layman, asks (in a post here) whether Lutherans and other Protestants believe that the validity of the Eucharist is dependent upon the valid ordination of the person who celebrates the sacrament. David answers the question in the negative: lay celebration of the Eucharist among Protestants may be irregular, but it cannot be said to be invalid. He may be right with respect to Protestants, but for Lutherans it is otherwise. In the lively discussion which followed, I replied as follows:

The answer to the question "Is a valid Eucharist dependent on a valid
priesthood?" is emphatically Yes, because the priest who offers the
Eucharist is our Lord Jesus Christ. His "orders" are perfectly valid.
The pastor stands in the place of Christ and celebrates in His stead
and by His command.

Ordination confers the right and duty to
stand in the place of Christ at the altar, not the "power" to confect
the Eucharist. That power belongs always and only to Christ. This
prayer (though it is Orthodox, not Lutheran) says it well:

Enable me by the
power of Thy Holy Spirit so that, being vested with the grace of
priesthood, I may stand before Thy holy Table and celebrate the mystery
of Thy holy and pure Body and Thy precious Blood ... for Thou, O Christ
our God, art the Offerer and Thou art the One offered; it is Thou Who
receivest the offering and Thou art Thyself the offering which is
distributed.

If a lay person presumes to stand in the place
of Christ at the altar, the difficulty is not that he does not have the
"power to confect" (which a properly ordained priest does not have
either); it is that he has presumed to stand in Christ's place when he
has not been called to do so. The faithful ought always to be able to
be confident that the celebrant does, in fact, stand in the place of
Christ. When a lay person, absent a proper call to that role, presumes
to celebrate, the faithful cannot have that confidence.

May 17, 2008

In a justly famous passage in Adversus Haereses, St Irenaeus of Lyons describes both the proper use (by the Church) and the misuse (by heretics) of the Scriptures using the metaphor of a mosaic image of a great king. When Scripture is misused, it is as if the mosaic of the king is taken to pieces and the gems re-arranged to show an entirely different image. If one does not know what the mosaic was originally intended to portray, one would not know that anything is amiss. (The passage is a bit long to quote here in full, but those who are unfamiliar with it can read it here.)

The key point St Irenaeus is making is that in order to be able to recognize the correct image, you have to already know what you are looking for. It is only after you have been given the essential message of the Scriptures that you will be able to recognize that message in the Scriptures. That is the importance of the rule of faith, or as St Irenaeus terms it, the "canon of truth" (κανόνα τῆς ἀληθείας). The rule of faith is the standard we can use to distinguish the proper use of Scripture from the misuse of it.

In the following chapter, St Irenaeus goes on to give a summary of the rule of faith itself, and the contents of that rule will not be a surprise to any orthodox Christian. But what interests me in the current passage is a passing reference to where the rule comes from. Discussing how a Christian may recognize the misuse of Scripture by false teachers, St Irenaeus writes:

Anyone who keeps unswervingly in himself the canon of truth received through baptism will recognize the names and sayings and parables from the Scriptures, but this blasphemous hypothesis of theirs [viz. of the heretics] he will not recognize. For if he recognizes the jewels, he will not accept the fox as the image of the king. He will restore each one of the passages to its proper order, and having fit it into the body of the truth, he will lay bare their fabrication and show that it is without support.

St Irenaeus tells us that the canon of truth, the very key to the proper interpretation of the Holy Scriptures, is given to us in baptism. Not at seminary, nor at ordination, nor at election or installation as district president, bishop, patriarch, or pope; but in baptism.

Does this mean that the key to the Scriptures is somehow magically transmitted in the baptismal liturgy? Indeed not. Baptism is not an isolated ceremony, but the central event in a complex process of Christian initiation. That process includes the catechesis of the new believer before baptism, the gradual inclusion of the catechumen into the worshipping community, the baptism itself, the gift of the Holy Spirit through laying-on of hands or chrism, and the mystagogical catechesis that takes place after baptism. I would contend that when St Irenaeus tells us that the canon of truth is given to us through baptism, he is referring not just to the washing, but to that entire process by which which the Gospel is handed over (παρεδωκα) to each new Christian. Christ Himself set this context for baptism, commanding us not simply to baptize, but to make disciples ... teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.

With the widespread practice of infant baptism, we've somewhat inverted the process: baptism comes first and the catechesis and inclusion into the worshipping community comes later, over a number of years. The same tradition is delivered even in this inverted order, but it makes it hard for us modern Christians to recognize that we receive the Apostolic Tradition, the κανόνα τῆς ἀληθείας, "through baptism."

April 30, 2008

I am a subscriber to the Lutheran liturgical quarterly Gottesdienst, which I recommend to all. The journal's epigram is Leitourgia Divina adiaphora non est, which translates to "The Divine Liturgy is not indifferent things." The journal's editors explain this aphorism as follows:

The principle expressed here is that the historic Divine Service of the Western Christian Church is more than Christian antiquity. It is a theological treasure which can and should be used in today's Christian Church. It has well served our Mother Church and our fathers in the faith for the past centuries and there is no reason to believe that it will not continue to do so in the future.

This is a sentiment with which I entirely concur. But the editors have not quite shown that the liturgy is not an adiaphoron. It is my understanding that "adiaphoron," in Lutheran theology, is a technical term with a precise definition: a practice neither commanded nor forbidden by God in Holy Scripture, which may therefore may neither be required nor prohibited in the Church. Thus to claim that something is not an adiaphoron is to claim that it is indeed commanded by God in Holy Scripture.

The editors are aware of this; for they go on to say:

Moreover, to say that liturgy is something not commanded by God is to reject the clear words of our Lord, who indeed has given specific commands which are quite liturgical in nature; for example, This do, pertaining to the Sacrament, and When ye pray, say, pertaining to the Our Father.

It is true that the Scriptures provide some instructions of a liturgical nature, such as the examples just cited. But to say that the liturgical instructions contained in the New Testament are sketchy would be something of an understatement. All of the liturgical instructions in the New Testament, taken together, fall very far short of even a minimal liturgical ordo. For example, the Lord does tell us "This do in remembrance of Me," but there is no indication that it is necessary to make that remembrance in the liturgical assembly. If I should decide to celebrate the Lord's Supper at my kitchen table with my family (or even by myself alone), there is nothing in Scripture that forbids me to do so.

It would seem that by the strict definition of an adiaphoron, the elements of the liturgy which are truly not adiaphora (because they have an explicit Scriptural command) form a very small subset of the Church's traditional liturgical praxis; and by trying to include all of the historic Divine Service of the Western Christian Church as non-adiaphora by reference to the fact that a small subset of it has divine sanction, the Gottesdienst editors are stealing a base.

I have a twofold question for my fellow Lutherans: are the Gottesdienst editors right to claim that the Church's liturgical ordo is not an adiaphoron? and if so, is that consistent with a properly Lutheran understanding of Sola Scriptura? (Non-Lutheran readers are certainly welcome to chime in as well, of course.)

My own view on this question can be found (implicitly, at least) in an earlier post here. Dix dixit.

April 29, 2008

The word "Catholic" is one of the most difficult and troublesome in the Christian vocabulary. It's one of those words which, by accumulating so many meanings, runs the risk of finally having no meaning. At the very least it is necessary to specify which sense of the word is meant almost every time one uses it.

But amongst all the various senses of this important term there is a core meaning from which all of the others are derived. LCMS pastor Father Rick Stuckwisch explores this core meaning in a marvelous post on his weblog entitled Preaching the Catholic Christ.

I commend, of course, the whole challenging post, but here are a few teasers. Fr Stuckwisch begins:

The catholicity of the Church, as confessed in the Creeds, is not
simply its universal spread throughout the whole world. It is
especially the gracious and glorious presence of Christ — in all His
fullness and with all His gifts and benefits — in each and every parish
of His Church on earth, wherever His Gospel is preached and
administered in His Name.

Here Fr Stuckwisch makes two important points: that catholicity is about fulness, not extensiveness in space (or even time); and that each local Church itself has that fulness, not by virtue of being a "piece of the whole" but by virtue of the divinely-promised presence of Christ.

With that foundation Fr Stuckwisch goes on to an in-depth discussion of preaching, showing how in the preaching of repentance and forgiveness the fulness of Christ is manifest and delivered. He devotes several paragraphs to explicating the kerygmatic, catechetical, liturgical, and sacramental character of proper preaching. He shows particularly forcefully that in preaching, just as in the administration of the sacraments, the pastor is acting in the stead and by the command of the Saviour:

This preaching of the catholic Christ is not simply preaching "about"
Him (although it's always good to be talking about Jesus), but, better
still, it is really His own preaching. The pastor preaches in the Name
of Jesus, in His stead, from within His Office. The pastor
preaches in the same way that he baptizes and absolves, as the one who
has been called and ordained to speak with the voice of Christ Himself.
In preaching, therefore, it is Christ Jesus who is speaking to His
people, calling them to repentance, forgiving their sins, giving them
His life and salvation.

In other words, Christ Jesus is the proper Subject
of the preaching in a two-fold sense: both as the One who is "doing the
verb" (i.e. He is the Preacher), and as the Content of the preaching.
Christ is the One who preaches, and Christ is the One who is preached.

For me, there is an echo in that last sentence of some language that occurs in the priest's prayer during the Cherubikon in the Byzantine rite: For Thou, O Christ our God, art the Offerer and Thou art the One
offered; it is Thou Who receivest the offering and Thou art Thyself the
offering which is distributed. That language reflects the fact that even though it is the priest who stands at the altar, it is Christ Who performs the action. But the priest is just as much in persona Christi in the pulpit as he is at the altar.

Finally, Fr Stuckwisch tells us that sound preaching is always liturgical; not because its subject is the liturgy, but because the sermon has its own structural and functional role to play in the liturgical action, which is to explicate the witness to Christ which has been made by the appointed readings, and to point the people of God to the delivery of forgiveness in the sacrament of the altar:

The sermon is "liturgical" when it proclaims what has been read in the
appointed Lections as fulfilled in the hearing of the people, and when
it brings them by that particular Word to the Altar of Christ in
repentance and faith

There was a time (not so long ago) when such emphasis on preaching would have sounded too "Protestant"; I thought that a Catholic Christian should value the sacraments more highly than preaching. But I have come to appreciate that when a sermon fulfills its role within the liturgy, applying the canon of truth to the Scriptures which are proclaimed in the liturgical assembly, there is nothing more "Catholic."

I have included a lot of excerpts, but there is a whole lot more goodness where that came from. As they say, read the whole thing.

April 23, 2008

Irenaeus at Retractiones made a challenging post last week on Sola Scriptura that I think is worthy of comment. Here is his lede:

Driving this morning running an errand, I had a weird, terrifying existential moment. I realized -- deep, deep in the gut -- that most Prot Christians in this country simply have their English Bibles, and they're actually trying to base what they believe on it, even though I would guarantee you that the vast majority of them have NO CLUE what the texts mean.

He goes on to attribute ordinary Protestants' cluelessness to a lack of understanding of the "Jewish and Greco-Roman" historical and cultural context, and to suggest that their understanding of the faith comes not from Scripture directly but is mediated through various Protestant traditions and magisteria (none of which, of course, self-identifies as a magisterium).

The cluelessness that Irenaeus recognizes would be no mystery whatever to his namesake (patron?) St Irenaeus of Lyons. But I would suggest that St Irenaeus would have a different view of the cause and cure of this problem. The problem is not a lack of sufficient historical understanding of the context of Scripture, nor is the cure to repair to an intellectual tradition and a magisterium of more intellectual and historical and theological heft and gravitas (as "our" Irenaeus puts it). No, for St Irenaeus, the problem is the absence of the canon of Truth -- the Church's rule of faith -- as the hermeneutical key to the Scriptures. The canon of Truth, which we know best in its form as the Church's Creed, is not something derived from Scripture by human intellection. It is itself the key to the Scriptures, without which the Scriptures cannot be rightly understood. And (again as St Irenaeus explains) the canon of Truth comes to us not by human derivation from the Scriptures themselves, but by Tradition from the Apostles (to whom it was given by the Saviour Himself).
Such is the cause.

April 16, 2008

One of my readers noted that folks who have dial-up Internet access are not in a position to read weblogs in a leisurely fashion. An e-mail discussion group is better for this situation.

I wouldn't know how to set up such a group, but to enable access to All The Fulness via e-mail, I have set up a "Subscribe" box at the bottom of the left-hand column. To subscribe, enter your e-mail address into the box and click the Subscribe button; then reply to the confirmation e-mail that you will receive.

Every time there's a new post at All The Fulness (that's once a year or so, for those of you keeping score), subscribers will receive the post in their e-mail inbox. If you want to comment on the post, e-mail me the comment and I will add it to the comments here on the weblog.

I'm using the Google Feedburner service for this, which I have never tried before. So I can't guarantee that it will work. We'll see.

April 15, 2008

Well, it may be "on" but the chances of anyone listening after a year of silence are pretty slim. Nevertheless, I am going to try to resurrect All The Fulness. There's no point in having a weblog just to let it lie fallow.

It's not that I haven't been active in the blogosphere. I have my "usual suspects" that I read faithfully, and often comment; but for some reason I have always been more comfortable commenting elsewhere than writing here. Let's see if I can change that.

This aphorism is very popular among "liturgically-minded" Christians, who rely on it to emphasize the importance of liturgy and (sometimes) to justify their interest in liturgical minutiae. And as an Anglo-Catholic "bells and smells" man from the beginning, it is an important principle for me as well. (I would note in passing that the aphorism is, if anything, more important for "liturgical Protestants" (Anglo-Catholics and Lutherans) than for Catholics and Orthodox. For Catholics and (especially) Orthodox, the centrality of the liturgy is simply a given, not something that must be continually argued for and justified.)

So what does this old saw actually mean?

For many the meaning is simply that the liturgy is important because
the liturgy expresses what we believe; that we ought to be careful
about how we worship because of what it says about our faith. Sloppy
and irreverent worship reveals sloppy theological thinking, and
heretical worship certainly indicates heretical doctrine. A stronger
form of this attitude says that we must edit our forms of worship to
conform to correct theology. We are to sit at our editor's desk with
our liturgical texts at one hand and our confessional documents and
systematic theology textbook at the other hand, wielding the editor's
pen to ensure that the former conforms strictly to the latter.

For others it means that liturgical texts serve as a source-book for
theologizing. The texts themselves are a doctrinal authority;
subordinate to the Scriptures, perhaps, but an authority just the
same. The extreme form of this attitude would picture the same
editor's desk as I did in the last paragraph, only this time we are to
conform the confessions to the liturgical texts, not the other way
around.

I think there is some truth in both of the views I have just outlined.
But I think the most important word in the saying is the one that is
usually left out when it is quoted. Usually we say simply "lex orandi,
lex credendi", as if to say "there's some relationship between belief
and prayer, but we're not saying exactly what it is." But the aphorism
is Lex Orandi Lex EST Credendi --
the rule of what is to be prayed IS the rule of what is to be
believed. It is not a statement of the way things ought to be, but a
statement of the way things are.

And in fact it is in our worship that we are taught, and receive, and
take to heart the faith that we hold. Our Lutheran Fathers express
that clearly when they note (AC V) that "that we may obtain this faith,
the ministry of teaching the Gospel and administering the sacraments
was instituted." They did not say that we obtain our faith by reading
the Bible, going to Sunday School, or even at our mother's knee. It is
through the Church's ministry of Word and Sacrament that we are given
the faith that saves us -- and that means liturgically. All other ways
by which we learn our faith are (at best) extensions of and secondary
to what happens in the liturgical assembly. Because extra-liturgical
ways of appropriating our faith have no divine promise attached to them
-- unlike the liturgical ministry of Word and Sacrament, they are not
covenanted means of grace.

A Church body may say that its rule of faith is found in its
confessional books; but the faith which is actually imparted to the folks in the pews is what they hear
and experience when they are actually sitting in those pews: lex orandi lex est credendi.

April 08, 2007

If any man be devout and love God, let him enjoy this fair and radiant triumphal feast!If any man be a wise servant, let him rejoicing enter into the joy of his Lord.If any have labored long in fasting, let him now receive his recompense.If any have wrought from the first hour, let him today receive his just reward.If any have come at the third hour, let him with thankfulness keep the feast.If any have arrived at the sixth hour, let him have no misgivings; for he shall in no way thereby be deprived.If any have delayed until the ninth hour, let him draw near, fearing nothing.And if any have tarried even until the eleventh hour, let him, also, be not alarmed at his tardiness.

For the Lord, who is jealous of his honour, will accept the last even as the first.He gives rest to him who comes at the eleventh hour, even as to him who has wrought from the first hour.And He shows mercy upon the last, And cares for the first;And to the one He gives, and upon the other He bestows gifts.And He both accepts the deeds, and welcomes the intention, both honors the acts and praises the offering.

Therefore: enter all of you into the joy of your Lord; receive your reward, both the first, and likewise the last.You rich and poor together, hold high festival!You sober and you heedless, honor the day!Rejoice today, both you who have fasted, and you who have disregarded the fast.The table is full-laden; let all feast sumptuously.The calf is fatted; let no one go hungry away.Enjoy ye all the feast of faith: receive ye all the riches of loving-kindness.Let no one bewail his poverty, for the universal Kingdom has been revealed.Let no one weep for his iniquities, for pardon has shown forth from the grave.Let no one fear death, for the Saviour's death has set us free.He that was held prisoner of death has annihilated it.By descending into Hell, He made Hell captive.He embittered it when it tasted of His flesh.And Isaiah, foretelling this, did cry: Hell, said he, was embitteredWhen it encountered Thee in the lower regions.

It was embittered, for it was abolished.It was embittered, for it was mocked.It was embittered, for it was slain.It was embittered, for it was overthrown.It was embittered, for it was bound in chains.It took a body, and met God face to face.It took earth, and encountered Heaven.It took that which was seen, and fell upon the unseen.

O Death, where is thy sting? O Hell, where is thy victory?Christ is risen, and thou, O Death, art overthrown!Christ is risen, and the demons are fallen!Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice!Christ is risen, and life reigns!Christ is risen, and not one dead remains in the grave.For Christ, being risen from the dead, is become the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep.